This invention relates to automated management of tasks, in particular to a method of defining information-based tasks and for a method of automatically supervising and assessing manpower for carrying out the defined tasks remotely with substantially no human management.
There has recently been a dramatic trend toward workplace flexibility. Flextime, telecommuting, and other changes reflect the need of workers to have more control over their work lives. Even with these changes, however, many individuals still find traditional work schedules inconvenient or untenable. Stay-at-home parents, college students, retirees, moonlighters, and “ski bums” all either prefer or would require the ability to work on the schedule of their choice from home. There thus has been a long-felt need by workers for work they can perform at their own pace, time, and place.
At the same time, employers have found it increasingly difficult to hire competent and productive full-time staff to perform their high-volume but fundamentally manual tasks. In addition, many such tasks sustain severe volume fluctuations, leading to either excessive overhead (if staffed for peak load) or organizational stress (if understaffed and requiring overtime or temporary workers). There has also long been an incentive to hire remote workers working in remote locations for tasks, e.g. small, easily definable, information-based tasks. There has also been a long-felt need to reduce management overhead. The benefits of using a remote workforce include low facility costs and a much wider pool of workers. There thus has arisen a whole class of companies that outsource many different types of information-based tasks that include, without limitation, data entry, telesales, transcription, translation, and editorial work. Managing such remote workers has always been a challenge.
Workflow software is known for helping manage a complex task. Workflow software allows one to break down a complex task into smaller tasks, and to keep track of the carrying out of each of the smaller tasks that make up a complex task. Workflow software mainly provides a bookkeeping function—rules and checks and bounds—to ensure that the complex task is preformed correctly and to keep track of the carrying out of the various smaller tasks. Management however is still carried out by human beings.
Software exists for automatically managing some specific types of tasks. By automatically is meant substantially without human management. However, this software is task specific. For example, there exists call center and customer relationship management (CRM) software to automatically route telephone calls and/or emails to remote workers (called agents in this context). In a call center, a relatively large number of agents (who may be remote) handle telephone communication with clients. The matching of calls between clients and agents is typically performed by software. The software routes the call to the agent best suited to handle the call based on predefined criteria (e.g., language skill, knowledge of products the customer bought, etc.). The software also immediately transfers relevant information about the client to a computer screen used by the agent. Thus, the agent can gain valuable information about the customer prior to receiving the call. As a result, the agent can more effectively handle the telephone transaction.
See for example U.S. Pat. No. 6,002,760 describing a universal queue for a call center. U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,128,646 and 6,185,292 describing skill-based dispatching of calls and emails in a call center, U.S. Pat. No. 6,178,239 for using a Petri net to model the operation of a call center, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,185,780 for predicting the workload in a call center. See also U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,070,142, 6,134,530 and 6,115,693 for simulating a sales center.
As a further example, software exists for managing remote workers carrying out the production of content for publications, e.g., managing manuscript reviewers, photographers, and contributors. See for example the Outerforce Platform from Outerforce Systems, New York, N.Y.
As a further example, software exists for managing remote workers carrying out data entry tasks such as viewing scanned filled-in forms and filling in fields based on viewing these forms.
While each of these task-specific systems includes many of the features that are desirable for managing remote workers, none has all the features desired to automatically manage, i.e. to manage substantially without human management, any type of worker working on any type of small information-based task.
Furthermore, no software is known to the inventors that provides a universal task management system, i.e., a system that can be configured to automatically and simultaneously manage—substantially with no human management—a combination of different types of remote workers carrying out different types of tasks.